limerence

I just wanna get high with my lover
Veo una muñeca cuando miro en el espejo
Kiss, kiss
Looking dolly, I think I may go out tonight
I just wanna ride, get high in the moonlight

-"Moonlight" by Kali Uchis

They drove up into the hills to the spot where they'd once watched the Fourth of July fireworks on a sweltering summer night nearly a decade ago. The valley below their feet was a carnival of dotted lights. Grey wisps of cirrus clouds glinted from the light of the three-quarter moon. 

She sat perched on the hood of the car. He leaned forward, fishing his vape out from his jacket. She'd always hated his habit, the perpetual carton of cigarettes tucked in his pockets. She thought about making a comment about how at least he no longer coated his lungs with tar, but swallowed the words. She had forfeit the right to make those comments years ago.

In an alternate life, maybe she would have stayed. But they'd each chosen paths that shut the doors on others, until the crisscross of alternative timelines withered off the vine. 

He exhaled beside her. A sweet scent rose into the air. 

He caught her staring in his periphery and turned. His eyes met hers, placid and impossible to read. Minutes passed before he moved. Maintaining his gaze, as if daring her to stop him, he settled his left hand over her right hand, palm down on the hood of the car. The calluses on his palm brushed against the back of her fingers, enveloping her in warmth. 

An errant cloud floated across the moon, casting shadows across their faces, granting a moment of privacy. His thumb stroked the back of her hand in a lazy rhythm as he watched her, like a panther with a tail swishing in anticipation. 

 In an alternate life, maybe she would have looked away.

She shifted her hand under his palm until their fingers were interlaced together. Without breaking eye contact, she raised their interlocked hands to her mouth. Her breath exhaled as she brushed his skin against her lips in a ghost kiss.

All at once, they were sixteen and seventeen again, intoxicated on the fumes of first love.

ecchymosis

With my hands in the ocean
With my hands in the ocean
With my hands in the ocean, I pay
I pray, oh, I pray

"Tick Tock" by Joji

 

There's something about you that reminds me of him. You look as if you haven't slept in days, shadows under your eyes, scrunched like the pinched edges of a dumpling. There's something compellingly handsome there, in a way that makes me want to smear dirt across your face. Something about you recalls the heavy cloud of marijuana and cigarettes, back before I even knew what weed smelled like, back when bad boys were something we fantasized about in books and movies, instead of the ones with their reckless motorcycles and culturally misappropriated tattoos for whom we now have no more shits left to give. 

But I heard you before I ever saw you. I hear you sing to an ex-lover, entreating her to remember the taste of your lips, watching her from the shadows as she caresses another man. I listen to your baritone gloom unfurl in ballad after ballad, the ache pulsating like a fresh bruise, and I can only wonder who broke your heart so soundly. And that reminds me of him too, the way I should have run, I should have turned the other way, but instead the poems and the music pulled me captive, a siren dooming the sailor to drown.

W.A.Y.S.

At forty-four minutes to four
An angel walked up to my door
Opened the windows to my soul
Told me he thinks that I should know
That there's no slowing down
As the globe spins 'round and 'round
You gotta keep going, gotta keep going
Gotta keep going, you gotta keep going
Gotta keep going, you gotta keep going
You gotta keep going, you gotta keep going
You gotta keep going
--

 Time doesn't stop even when your world does.

 --

If there's one thing that I learned
While in those county lines
It's that everything takes time
You have gotta lose your pride
You have gotta lose your mind
Just to find your peace of mind
You have got to trust the signs
Everything will turn out fine
So why aren't you smiling?
Why aren't you smiling?

--

That's why you keep going.

-- "W.A.Y.S." by Jhene Aiko

Magnets

"Pretty girls don't know the things that I know
Walk my way, I'll share the things that she won't

Uh-oh, dancing past the point of no return
Let go, we can free ourselves of all we've learned
I love this secret language that we're speaking
Say it to me, let's embrace the point of no return
Let's embrace the point of no return
Let's embrace the point of no return"

"Magnets" by Disclosure ft. Lorde

----------------
I've been exceptionally restless in recent days, and it's driving me insane. I feel as if I'm riding on a bullet train that doesn't stop, and I'm just watching my days blitz past in a monotonous blur out my control.

Sort Of

Does it make you nervous
When you hear my bones
Animate my body
Without my soul?

-- "Sort Of" by Silversun Pickups

I love the guitar section in this song. These days I guess I've been listening to more alternative R&B, Trip-Hop, dream pop (? I suck at musical genres ?) but rock will always be my bread and butter.

I've been thinking about it again recently, since there's been rumors that Ai Yazawa is drawing again. It's been almost seven years since Nana went on hiatus; it would be a fitting time for her to return. I wonder if other people are like me, in that at some point in their lives, they encounter a piece of art--be it a book, a song, an album, a painting, a film--that becomes so monumental, so influential to who they are.

There are two works that have held that power over me. One was Wasteland by Francesca Lia Block. Wasteland set my words free and is solely responsible for my love of vignettes. The other was the entire series of Nana. I've written about Nana Osaki and her influence on me before on this blog. But it's funny. When I reread some chapters of Nana a few months ago, I discovered that I related to the story even more than before. I was 15 years old when I fell in love with the story about the two 20-year-old heroines in Tokyo. I'm 23, almost 24 now. As a teenager, I didn't fully grasp the decision Nana O made when she chose not to follow Ren to Tokyo. Now, I can understand the implications of choosing pride and personal career ambition over romantic love.

Obedear

Obedear, the sky is low 

Gather up its harm and gods 

With grateful arms 

Obedear, the sky is low 

Gather up its harm and gods 

With grateful arms

--"Obedear" by Purity Ring

O but dear
it's been creeping up on me
not the fire that blazes through
like the oblivious frog yet to notice
the temperature has begun to rise

O but dear

my limbs ache in suspension

marionette strings pulled taut

as self control dons its war bonnet

in tribute to delayed gratification

O but dear

two honeybees in a dance

show where the sweetest nectar lies

winter abdicates to spring
as i wring these restless hands

Candlxs

It's human nature 
We all are dying 
But I'm still burning bright and blue 
If we're in danger 
If time is flying 
If we'll both be lifeless soon

....

You told me you ain't wanna do it
Said love was for stupid people and cupid
I swore to you that I could make you lose it
And now I got you dancing to my music

-- "Candlxs" by Angel Haze

Vulnicura

I am a glowing shiny rocket 

Returning home 

As I enter the atmosphere 

I burn off layer by layer 

Jettison

-- "Black Lake" by Bjork

i find myself reading as many interviews with Bjork on her latest album Vulnicura as i can get my hands on.

i discovered Bjork in high school, after learning that OLIVIA was a huge fan of hers. this was back in the day when it wasn't as easy to stream free music online. i borrowed Medulla, Vespertine, and Volta from the library. i bought Debut for two dollars from a library sale. some of her songs didn't jive with me, but the ones i loved became regular fixtures in my playlist--Pagan Poetry, Unison, All is Full of Love, and my favorite--Unravel.

in these interviews, Bjork breaks down in tears whenever they probe her about the emotional process of writing this break-up album, following her split with Matthew Barney, the father of her 12 yo daughter and her romantic partner for over a decade.

when your life has been so intricately intertwined with someone else's for that long, what happens when the cords are cut?

some days, i like to imagine that the little ironies in the world are some divine creator's way of sculpting harmony from an oftentimes nonsensical narrative. as i pore over the lyrics of Vulnicura, i hear my old voice rising, conjured from the melodic words like a ghost: on the brink of rupture from burning in degrees Kelvin

"Hey you. Tell me, what happens to a star when it dies? Will it incinerate everything around in a colossal explosion? 

Or will it silently collapse in on itself, a victim of its own flame -- burning and burning until it has burned itself out?"

and stranded in space, three years in the aftermath

"Maybe I wasn't the star. I was the rocket ship, and your heart was the moon. My aim never wavered all those years, but it didn't matter. Once the flame sputtered out, I was trapped in the coldness of space. Somewhere between you and the person I had once been."

and now, here we are--incinerating in a descent back down to the earth, unfurling layer by layer to reveal what's left underneath after all this time. to be born anew.

Lights On

Break or seize me 

If the flame gets blown out in the shine 

I will know that you can not be mine 

Live or leave me

Let me tell you all my secrets in a whisper till the day is done.

I sit on the carpeted floor with a half-drunken bottle of Abita Purple Haze as they talk. She's opening a second bottle of champagne and asking S about his plans to propose to his girlfriend. I watch as the liquid lurches as she fumbles in refilling her glass--a telltale sign of her inebriated state. E is playing with the French bulldog, while C helps himself to another slice of king cake (in celebration of the beginning of Mardi Gras festivities in the city). S talks of diamonds and engagements, and I ask how he and his girlfriend met.

Later, I wonder if she would have told us everything if she had been sober. Maybe she wouldn't have told us that she thinks her boyfriend in California is about to dump her. Maybe she wouldn't have said all those other things about her past. Or maybe she would have anyways.

We are a strange group of six. Four boys, two girls. Under any other circumstances, we would have never all become friends. We are essentially your standard dysfunctional yet loveable sitcom cast. But here we are on a Friday night, with a neglected game of Cards Against Humanity splayed out on the coffee table amongst drained glasses of Bellini. They flip their secrets face-up one by one, but I have yet to play my hand.

I can tell you a little something scandalous about each of them, but they have nothing on me. Not because I don't trust them. But because my lack of secrets is the greatest secret of all.

I still remember what she said to me just last Monday, about a girl she knows from back home who is 24, engaged, and still a virgin--exclaiming this to me as if it were the most absurd thing she'd ever heard in her life. Then, there's the last time we played Never Have I Ever at the sushi happy hour at Vitascope, and I sat out because I knew that even more than any of the dirty secrets they each aired that night, the biggest shocker to them would be mine.

I hide this from them, not because I am ashamed, but because I don't want a reaction. I don't need your pity or your incredulity or heaven forbid your approval (and I have dealt with all these before). If they ask me directly one day, I will tell them. But for now, let them speculate of unspeakable sorrows, dark and tragic pasts, or raw heartbreak if they deign to notice that I do not speak--when in fact, the sheep in wolf's clothing is as pure as the driven snow.

Break or seize me 

Let the things that I tell you survive

In the way that you handle your size 

Live or leave me

--"Lights On" by FKA Twigs

until we bleed

So we're bound to linger on 

We drink the fatal drop 

Then love until we bleed 

Then fall apart in parts 

it took us 3 hours yesterday. 1 hour to cut open her skull. 1 hour to open up her spinal column. 1 hour just to remove the brain from her head, spinal cord swishing from the back like a ponytail.

i've held a heart in my hands. but only literally speaking, that is. we talk of romantic hyperboles and make references to the Aztecs and their ritual sacrifices, but cupped inside my hands, the heart doesn't feel so monumental. a hollowed mass of muscle fibers and vessels, it weighs lighter than a tennis ball.

there are no hackneyed honeyed words, no dramatic tales of historical intrigue that describe the feel of a brain in one's hands. it sinks into your palms, heavy as a locked chest; you feel the weight and heft of its contents but you can only speculate what is hidden inside. who was this person, what kind of life did she live, what memories were mapped into the ridges and crevices. it's the closest i've ever felt to her--this cadaver whose body we've cut open and examined for weeks.

some of these days, i don't know who i am anymore. my last two exam grades were average, and when your whole life has been revolving around exams, it's hard not to place your value on numbers. i feel painfully ordinary, especially when i don't write. i want to stand out but i want to hide. they gossip here like buzzards, circling for a carcass to scavenge. i am the girl with the bow in her short cropped hair, the girl in black boots. i don't want to be known as the girl who kept dancing at the block party with that one guy who was maybe drunk and oh look what do you think is happening here ho ho ho (what a ho).

i've been thinking about the heart a lot these days. well, literally too, but i mean that in the figurative sense. i think about how long it takes for a person to fall and wonder if i've somehow shut down the part of my brain that surrenders itself to the heart's stupidity. i can see the mental pro/con bullet points under the boy's name and wonder why my gut is silent now. i felt nothing when his hands were at my waist and his fingers were laced in mine. i think of all the avoided gazes and prickling blushes and unsent digital love letters from those forsaken teenage years and wonder if, at age 23, i've lost the ability to let myself bleed.

Now we're bound to linger on

We drink the fatal drop

Then love until we bleed

Then fall apart in parts 

-- "Until We Bleed" by Kleerup ft. Lykke Li

Wading

Thought I was wading
Thought I was wading for you
I have been waiting
I will be waiting
Till I turn blue

-- "Wading" by Jhené Aiko

On another Jhene Aiko fix. Her newest album Souled Out is on loop as I study for my second exam.

Sunset

I saw you again; it felt like we had never met.
It's like the sun set in your eyes and never wanted to rise.
And what have you done with the one I love?
When I look into your eyes, I see no surprise.
 
I always thought it was a shame,
That we have to play these games.
It felt like you really knew me.
Now it feels like you see through me.

 -- "Sunset" by The XX

A close friend of mine called me last night. Her voice has a natural airy lilt that I've imagined the Daisy-Buchanan-esque socialites converse in as they sip their jewel-toned cocktails. Fluttery, rising upwards at the ends like kite tails. Someone who didn't understand English wouldn't have had the faintest idea that was she was calmly talking about her break-up with her boyfriend.

I'd chronicled the relationship since the earliest days. They met last year as first-year medical students, sharing a common interest in climbing. I saw the magnets coming together long before she was willing to admit the truth out loud. I still remember the exact date when she texted me that they had finally, officially put a label onto what they had. Boyfriend and Girlfriend.

Just a little under a year later, it's over. 

Fall For Your Type, Remix

I know I've already posted the lyrics for two Angel Haze songs, but I am addicted to her stuff right now. She has some interesting remix covers of songs from all other genres (e.g. Castle on a Cloud, Same Love, Summertime Sadness, etc.) but what I really like about her are her lyrics. She chooses some really interesting words and phrases for her rhymes.

(Also, I personally think her flow is better than Iggy Azalea's...)

Below are the lyrics for her version of "Fall For Your Type," the Jamie Foxx/Drake song I've posted about before on this blog. I find her lyrics sooooooo much more interesting than Drake's for this song. 

---------------

 

you are an ocean's breeze, i am the tidal wave.

you are every paragraph, i am just a title page.

you have the heart i hold exactly where you desire it.

it's all so effortless, like what you did to acquire it.

each time i find it harder just to keep my composure.

i'm trying to show you all of me like indecent exposure.

i'll be the gun, you be my holster.

i need your love. i need you closer.

seems like forever when only an hour's passed.

we fallin' slower than grains of salt in an hourglass.

emotions running wild, you are who tames them.

my only means for tranquility; you my sanctum.

and if i could, i'd take your eyes and blend them in with the stars

so whenever we ain't together, i still see them from afar.

but that's insane, i'd do whatever to just to feel you.

even all of that don't come close to what i will do.

they say love holds the power to

fulfill you, heal you, kill you, hurt and abuse you

take away from you used to

i try to paint a picture like a canvas plane

to try to put words together like a Scrabble game.

i said i wouldn't stop until i said what i needed to, right?

alright, let's go.

look, i pour my heart out in an effort just to win you

and modify my actions solely so they won't offend you.

i mean, i would wrestle time even if it get rewinded.

everything you looking for in me is where you find it.

so you can stop your searching, baby.

i know you hurting, baby.

your self-esteem so low sometimes that you feel worthless, baby.

okay. you hide it well, but you know i can tell.

i see right through that bullshit that you be tryin' to sell.

so let it drop, let it fall, let it blow with the wind.

i told you once, told you twice, and imma tell you once again

that i'll be here. yes, i'll be here.

and if love is blind then my mental's clear.

and all we have is time and good intentions.

fuck your brake, fuck your suspension.

put your foot on that gas until you don't see your past.

yeah, i said drive until your vision blurred.

and let my voice tell our story; spoken words.

fuck 'em. let them hate me where they never was.

and fucking Shakespeare couldn't have wrote a better love.

but people tell me that i'm trippin' and i say you different.

and when they ask me how

i can't provide a description; you don't need one.

i will disconnect them all, like a broken joint.

just to prove i only see you like a focal point.

i know that distances may cause some complications.

but you make me feel good, fucked up, exonerated.

still, i wonder what you like beneath the shackles that you wearing.

i been longing to release you from a load that's overbearing.

tell me, are you protected by a guard, boo?

or could i blow and make it fall like cards do?

and i ain't interested 'til it involves you.

you got your doors locked and i just saw through.

you reached a height of loneliness 'cause we all do,

but everything that goes up gotta fall too.

Deep Sea Diver

So, instead of sailing I live like a human parachute
The more I'm falling the further I am compared to you
It's like I'm stuck in the air, while you're pale and blue
Chasing clouds and hoping they lead a trail to you
See, we were deep sea divers
And I was focused on survival
And death does you part when you're focused on its rival
Defibrillator love, I'm just focused on revival

You could, you could put your hands in mine
And we'll walk through the sands in the sand of time
Until we paint the end of this love scene
Until I'm laid to rest in your blood stream

Until I hear the strings of your heart playing
Until I hear the things you are not saying
Until I find out what it really means
And hopefully it's everything it really seems

-- "Deep Sea Diver" by Angel Haze

Battle Cry

Money cannot buy 

All the love that's here tonight 

All the love that's here tonight 

It's just you and I 

So lift your hands toward the sky 

Lift your hands toward the sky

I asked you once, Whose song is that? What I meant to ask was who you had written it for. Instead, what I'd asked was a matter of possession, ownership. But the funny thing about songs, I've learned, is that once you release them into the air, they belong to no one and everyone at once. The melodies and harmonies weave into the fabric of life outside of you. It's the song on the radio when a boy learns that his friend was killed on duty, it's the song that the DJ plays when the high school sweethearts share their last dance at the senior prom, it's the song looped on repeat as a woman hits rock bottom, lying in bed and wallowing in self-loathing at how her life has turned out. Your songs, so personal and so vulnerable, become a part of another person's memory, a trigger that can both heal and hurt--depending on the circumstances.

Take the sun and you still grow / Lose the light and you still glow

As I hear those last chords rising in the darkened sky, I close the pages shut on us. The symphony of the night has already started to buzz with static, and I won't be able to hear you for much longer. In time, I will become nothing more than a ghost conjured by an acoustic trigger. I am translucent, and a crystal wind passes through me. I lock these memories in my chest, not because I fear you will lose them, but because from now on, you will write new ones--hundreds and thousands extending beyond the years I never had.

So sing with me your battle cry
Sing with me your battle cry

 --"Battle Cry" by Angel Haze ft. Sia

Starring Role

It almost feels like a joke to play out the part
When you are not the starring role in someone else's heart
You know I'd rather work alone, than play a supporting role
If I can't get the starring role.

-- "Starring Role" by Marina and the Diamonds

There are a couple of habits you pick up as a storyteller.

You become really good at remembering the minutiae of people's lives. You know that this person will eat only mushroom pizza and no other toppings. You know that this other person can recite the lyrics to every Backstreet Boys song ever recorded. You know that this person accidentally hit reply all to the work e-mail listserv, and so everyone saw him joke about hasenpfeffer in response to an email about an Easter Bunny photo-op at the hospital. You catalog all these quirks into your brain, because the best script-writing is happening all around you. You simply learn to pay attention better than anyone else.

You also develop the habit of seeing life around you as a story in the process of unfolding. If you're the type that shies away from attention, perhaps you imagine yourself in the supporting role to one of your dramatic friends. Maybe you're the witty one who makes snippy wisecracks about the heroine's mishaps, or maybe you're the sidekick who gets the inside scoop of every escapade. If you imagine yourself as part of an ensemble cast, you might wonder which of your friends has garnered the biggest fanbase among viewers, whose storyline has been the most consistently riveting, or which potential romantic pairing in your life do the viewers ship most rabidly.

So when things don't go the way you wanted, you learn to go with the flow, because you know that nobody writes a story where the dominoes all line up perfectly. Nobody wants to watch a TV show about a protagonist who gets everything he's ever wanted without facing a single setback. Maybe you had to fail here, in order to stumble onto a whole new and exciting narrative arc elsewhere. Maybe you weren't meant to attain that dream at this moment, because what's coming around the corner is so much greater than anything you could have achieved right now.

Maybe you and I have circled each other for so long, because our time wasn't then. It is now.

Twice

Was it the blue night

Gone fragile

Was it about the men

In wonder steady gone under

Was it the light ways

So frightening

Was it a two wills

One mirror holding us dearer now

-- "Twice" by Little Dragon

Two hours after I'd risen, a vague feeling tugged at me, like when a sliver of lyrics splinters into your brain and, for the love of god, you can't remember a thing about the song it belongs to. I remembered nothing about what I had dreamed in the night--only that these melancholy bones respond to you like how the aching of arthritic joints portends rain. I could peer into the ocean depths and see nothing in that canvas of rippling darkness, but a sonar device would tell me what I already knew. Miles and miles below the water's surface, you lurk in the crevasses of my brain, a grotesque nightmarish thing that will never see the light of day. I do not need to see you to know you are still here.

Last Train Home

But we sing if we're going nowhere
Yeah we sing if it's not enough
And we sing
Sing without a reason to ever fall in love

-- "Last Train Home" by Lostprophets

The ground was still wet this morning. The slick black asphalt, wrung out by cars huddled in their morning commute, hissed with the spray of rainwater. The flowering trees had already shed their petals before the storm; I never did figure out if the blossoms were pear or cherry or plum. I tried not to step on the writhing earthworms, though they covered nearly every inch of the concrete sidewalk--some with half their bodies squashed flat by the fresh imprint of a shoe, others doomed prey to the robins or the rising sun. Fiddling with my headphones, I shuddered as I caught sight of a flattened frog, limbs splayed out beside the pinkish translucent worms that looked almost like intestines. Forty paces further, I saw black feathered wings shrouded in a funeral veil of crinkled brown leaves. The little bird looked so peaceful, lying on its side in that bed of brush with eyes closed shut, that it took me a moment to realize that it was dead.

I killed two crickets today. It wasn't on purpose, I swear. I was in the bathroom and about to take a piss, when I saw the two huddling in the corner by the bathtub. I didn't want to kill them. Not like my roommate, who took a wild swing at one that appeared above her bed last Sunday. I had grabbed the first container I found in the kitchen and swept them in before closing the lid. I didn't think they would die in the unwashed container, still slick with chili oil, did I? Find a cricket in the house and good luck has come. Kill the cricket in your house and bad luck will befall. They came to bring you good luck and you killed them the first instant you saw them? she teased when I called. Superstition had always been just a plaything. I had read those Feng-Shui books for fun as a child until she confiscated them. She didn't want my mind warped with such things. She didn't want me to observe death all around and wonder if something were about to happen.

Chandelier

I'm gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier
I'm gonna live like tomorrow doesn't exist
Like it doesn't exist
I'm gonna fly like a bird through the night, feel my tears as they dry
I'm gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier

-- "Chandelier" by Sia

--------------------------------------------------------- 
THIS is the song that Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" aspired to be. Now all Sia needs to do is to swing naked on a chandelier for the music video.

Random Pop Thought of the Day, #2

Last month, I wrote about Katy Perry and her culture-appropriation tactics to promote Prism, specifically donning geisha garb for "Unconditionally" and affronting Muslims with an Allah pendant in the Egypt-themed "Dark Horse." Beneath under all that headline-making tomfoolery, however, is the plain fact the songs she's promoted for Prism grate on my nerves. The chorus of "Unconditionally" is a bane to my ears and I found "Dark Horse" tolerable until all the Egypt stuff started going on, and by then I was so done with the Katy Perry machine that I peaced out.

Now, let's talk about a pop song that's gotten me in a bit of a jam, in that I should dislike the song for its lyrical content, but damn it, every time it plays on the radio my roommate and I immediately start bouncing around to the beat.

I'm talking about Jason Derulo's "Talk Dirty."

The first time I heard this song was on the radio in my roommate's car as we were heading home from brunch at a German cafe. My roommate and I have always joked about how Jason Derulo never fails to say his own name somewhere in his song, and usually it's an autotuned sing-songy rendition of "Jasoooon Deruuuuloooo." Except in "Talk Dirty," a woman says his name prissily in heavily accented English at the beginning of the song.

Me: "Wait, is that supposed to be an Asian accent?"

*I'm still not sure what accent it's supposed to be, but there's a reason why I jumped to the conclusion that it was Asian. Back in the golden era of my physical fitness, aka middle school when I played tennis 2.5 hours x 7 days a week, there were two brothers who practiced at the same clinic I went to. Their mother played favorites, and it was very obvious even in the way she'd say their names. With the older brother, his name would usually come out in a ferocious bark. With the younger brother, it'd come out several notches higher in pitch and come out in a sugary, accented lilt: "Jaaaaasonnnn!"

Anyways, the rest of "Talk Dirty' goes on to talk about how Jason is an indiscriminate, international lover of women as sexual objects. If you sit down and actually read the lyrics, they're pretty... um, yeah.

Been around the world, don't speak the language
But your booty don't need explaining
All I really need to understand is
When you talk dirty to me

The rap verses featuring 2 Chainz has even more explicit degrading stuff, so yeah... go look it up yourself. But I do have to admit my ears perked up when I heard the word "Taiwan" in the lyrics. Holy pomelo, is this the first time Taiwan's been mentioned in a Billboard-topping song?

I know what the girl them want,
London to Taiwan
I got lipstick stamps on my passport
I think I need a new one

It's a little disappointing that this is the context of its first major appearance in the lyrical arena, but oh well. Anyways, the song concludes with that same accented maybe-Asian girl who giggles and goes, "Wat? I don undastand!"

So there you have it. The whole song is lyrically a mess. It falls into the usual trap of portraying ethnic women as exotic sexual commodities without a voice--in fact, it's clear that it doesn't matter if they can't be understood, because the only thing we care about is the fact that they can put out.

I should hate this song. But I don't, because THIS SONG IS SO DAMN CATCHY. That saxophone line at the end of each chorus? Whenever it plays on the radio, my roommate and I start dancing every single time.

Damn it Jason Derulo, why couldn't you sing about baby squirrels or doing laundry, or I dunno--something universally harmless--to this song instead?? Then I wouldn't be stuck with this moral/ethical quandary and wondering if I am morally obligated to skip your song on the radio.

ETA: Well, I found a suitable alternative thanks to some Google sleuthing. The melodic line of the saxophone was apparently sampled from "Hermetico" by Balkan Beat Box, so there we go--something I can listen to without feeling guilty:



A remix, I believe, that's also pretty catchy: